It only takes a few hours of being in the ancient holy city of Varanasi – the most sacred place in the world for Hindus – to realise that the question needs to be reworded as “what is not dumped in the Ganges?”

“If Modi can’t clean up the river, no one can. But I can guarantee 101 per cent that he will. He is upset at the dirt in India and he is determined to do something about it. Tourists come here because of its name but once they see the filth, they curse us and never return.,”

Alok Tiwari

On an overcast, but oppressively humid, August day, India’s holiest river is the colour of pewter and swollen from the monsoon rains, which have raised the water level to cover some of the famous ghats – the long stretch of steps leading down to the river.

A cremation on the Ganges.
Photo: Amrit Dhillon

At Assi Ghat, named after the river Assi, which flows into the Ganges near this spot, a herd of buffalo has been brought by their owner to cool off in the river. Submerged up to their backs, they stand, still as statues, in the same water that locals and pilgrims will bathe in.

Advertisement

“The Assi river has been reduced to this,” says Virender Nishad, a seventh generation boatman, pointing to a three-metre wide drain, full of sludge, plastic and litter. “If nothing changes, the Ganges will become like this too in 20 or 30 years. If we go on polluting it, the river will be ruined and so will we.”

Nishad represents that curious paradox found all over India – everyone knows what the problem is and how it should be fixed but somehow it never is. The will to act is missing, in ordinary people, in the government.

Nishad has grown up on the ghats. Now 30, he has seen the river he regards as a living deity become indescribably dirty. “When I was a boy, I used to drink the water. It used to be much cleaner and fast-flowing,” he says.

But his memories have probably been sanitised by time because it was almost 30 years ago that the Indian government launched its first huge clean-up project so the river cannot have been as clean as Nishad remembers.

Over the decades, numerous campaigns to clean the Ganges have come and gone. Billions of dollars have been thrown into the river. Good intentions have been felled by corruption and mismanagement. The pollution and its causes have been dissected ad nauseam. Yet it is filthier than ever.

The Ganges flows for 2500 kilometres from the Himalayas through four states where 400 million Indians live through to the east coast where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. As it passes through 100 towns and cities, it absorbs all their human and industrial waste.

Experts estimate that more than 3000 million litres of untreated sewage from these towns along the Ganges are pumped into the river every day. By the time it reaches Varanasi, whose untreated sewage (or most of it) is also pumped into the waters, it becomes a sewer and the sixth most polluted river in the world.

Dr Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, a university professor whose family has been temple priests here for 13 generations, says that 33 sites in the city continually discharge raw sewage into the river.

According to Mishra, who also runs the Sankat Mochan Foundation which campaigns to clean the Ganges, scientists in the foundation’s laboratories have found the river has a faecal coliform count of more than 1.5 million per 100ml of water. Water regarded as safe for bathing should not contain more than 500 faecal coliform per 100ml, so bathing in the Ganges is only for the strong-hearted or those with blind faith.

The foundation’s slogan is that “Not a drop of sewage should go into the Ganges” – although this has yet to be achieved. “I know it’s dirty but I begin my morning prayers every day with a dip in the river,’’ Mishra says. ‘‘ It doesn’t affect my faith.”

That faith is predicated on the belief that the waters of the Ganges are both pure and purifying. As British travel writer Eric Newby wrote in his 1966 book Slowly Down the Ganges: “To drink the water, having bathed in it, and to carry it away in bottles is meritorious. To be cremated on its banks, having died there, and to have one’s ashes cast in its waters, is the wish of every Hindu.”

The country’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi, is one such Hindu and he is now the latest big hope for those who wish to clean up the Ganges. Known by his admirers as a man of action who can turn ideas into reality, he stood for election in Varanasi in the recent general election and won a thumping majority.

In a speech to thank voters on the banks of the Ganges on May 17, amid Hindu chants, Modi pledged to clean the country’s holiest river, referring to it, as do millions of Hindus, as his “Ma Ganga” or Mother Ganges. Modi has allocated 20.4 billion rupees ($340 million) for the clean-up and says he will succeed where all previous governments have failed.

“If Modi can’t clean up the river, no one can. But I can guarantee 101 per cent that he will. He is upset at the dirt in India and he is determined to do something about it. Tourists come here because of its name but once they see the filth, they curse us and never return,” says Alok Tiwari, 35, owner of a nearby roadside restaurant.

He too bathes every day in the river. Millions of pilgrims come every year to Varanasi because to bathe in the Ganges is to wash away your sins. To die here is to escape the cycle of reincarnation and achieve instant salvation.

Every day, the ghats are full of pilgrims who have endured long, hard train journeys to make their way to fulfil their lifelong desire to take a holy dip in the Ganges.

Every centimetre of the river is sacred to them. They make offerings of flowers and rose petals. They remember their ancestors as they pray. On the journey home, they all carry a small amount of the precious water for use in rituals at home. The moment of entering the water is special like no other.

“When they step into the water, they are so overcome by euphoria that they lose their footing or go too far in,’’ Nished says. ‘‘There are no lifeguards, no life rings. It’s up to us boatmen to get them out.” He says that he has saved 100 people from drowning.

On the ghats, the boatmen, restaurant owners, flower sellers all seem to know how the river can be protected against pollution. Tour guide Rajesh Choudhury, whose office is on Tulsi Ghat, says he is ashamed when tourists want to see the sun rise on the ghats because he knows local people will be lined up on the bank, defecating.

“We need to stop those who urinate and defecate in the river. We have to put up signs telling pilgrims not to bathe with soap, oil and shampoo. We must fine cattle owners who bring their animals to bathe here. And we need policemen on each ghat to enforce these rules. Right now, there is nothing, not a single signpost saying don’t litter,” says Choudhury.

But he blames the culture more than the government’s failures. Of course, India must build sewage treatment plants and penalise factories that pump noxious effluents into the river but he feels that ordinary Indians must also learn to be clean.

The filth of the Ganges is mirrored in the filth of Varanasi. If the one million inhabitants of the city cannot keep it clean, they are unlikely to keep the river clean.

Once, Varanasi (also known as Benares), one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, boasted a glorious civilisation. Indian music, dance, poetry and religious thought flourished here. A few kilometres away is Sarnath where the Buddha gave his first sermon.

Today it is a slum. The city is pot-holed, full of rubbish where goats, dogs and cows rummage, roadside eateries serve food right next to open sewers swarming with flies, people eat snacks and throw the wrappers on to the street, men spit and urinate, and the roads are engorged with noisy, chaotic traffic.

Mark Twain famously said: “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” Stanley Benjamin, a 30-year-old hotel manager who moved to Varanasi seven months ago had heard of Twain’s observation but it failed to prepare him for the assault on his senses.

“I am still suffering from culture shock,” says Benjamin, who moved from Kerala in south India where life is cleaner and more orderly. He is the general manager of Suryauday Haveli, a charming, 100-year-old mansion on Assi Ghat. He shakes his head when he talks about how people behave.

“They always blame the government instead of looking at themselves. They keep their homes clean but throw their rubbish out onto the street. As for the river, everything is thrown into it,” he says.

The ghats themselves are dirty and infested with hawkers and conmen out to fleece tourists. Even so-called holy men demand ‘‘baksheesh’’ to be photographed. Amazingly enough, though, hawkers and boatmen manage to catch fish, even in the areas by the bank, near where the boats are anchored, areas that are choked with rubbish.

Here on the ghats is the place that exemplifies the worst of the city, the Manikarnika cremation ghat where funeral pyres burn night and day.

An endless procession of biers carrying the dead, covered in red and gold shrouds, keeps threading its way through the alleyways towards the ghat. It’s estimated that 35,000 bodies are cremated here every year.

On a busy day the ghat looks like a scene from hell. Bodies that have not been properly cremated – if the family is poor and unable to buy the right quantity of wood, which is expensive – are just pushed into the river.

Also, according to Hindu tradition, five categories of dead – holy men, pregnant women, children under five, people bitten by snakes and lepers – must not be cremated. Instead, they are weighted down with stones and pushed out into the river.

“After 24 hours, they rise to the surface and many end up by the banks,’’ Nishad says. ‘‘The authorities do nothing. It’s up to us boatmen to push them away from the shore.’’

Sewage is not just Varanasi’s problem or the Ganges’ problem. It plagues the entire country. Other water bodies are similarly polluted. India's cities and towns generate 38.2 billion litres of sewage every day. Its installed capacity to treat sewage is 11.8 billion litres, about 30 per cent of what it needs.

In a way, the solution is simple. India has to build sewers, treat its sewage, punish industries that discharge their waste into the river and make people develop cleaner habits.

“Ninety per cent of the pollution of the Ganges is from untreated sewage,’’ says Mishra. ‘‘Only the other 10 per cent is from human behaviour.”

Many locals disagree. Tapan Das, a 55-year-old hotelier who has lived his entire life in Varanasi, says it is up to every resident to keep the river and the ghats clean. “Everyone talks but no one does anything. It is a desperate situation,” he says.

In July, a family friend of Das’ died and he attended the cremation at Manikarnika ghat. Tradition dictates that mourners must bathe in the Ganges after the funeral. “I did bathe in it, out of faith. But when I came home, I had a shower to wash away the Ganga water!”